I must admit that I recorded the accompanying video blog post before I had a chance to read the 2014 Cisco Annual Security Report (CASR), but this time slip on my part sets up a now-more-than-ever situation for what I’m about to tell you. The CASR projects 500,000 to 1,000,000 person global shortage in the number of IT security professionals that public and private sector organizations will need to cope with the security challenges of the foreseeable future. Yikes!

How will societies around the world bridge this gap? Technical schools and universities can train new people, but that’s going to take time for them to respond to demand, much less do the actual training. Public and private organizations can also recruit existing security professionals, but this can quickly turn into a bidding war for talent. I can also project increased demand for outsourced security services, but many of the supply and demand dynamics will apply here as with recruiting from the pool of established experts. Read More »

As previously introduced in my colleague Song’s blog post, Cisco Prime Service Catalog is an industry-leading IT service catalog solution for any managing any type of service request – from desktop to mobility to data center. If you aren’t familiar with our product already, make sure to watch this video:

In most organizations, there is no single system or “app store” that end-users can use to request all the IT tools and services they need to do their job. There are typically different siloed processes for ordering, fulfilling and tracking each of those IT resources (e.g. mobile devices, laptops, applications, infrastructure, access to systems). And with the continued proliferation of new technologies and applications, this has become increasingly frustrating for end-users – and more challenging for IT service delivery teams. Cisco Prime Service Catalog provides a modern and unified approach to solve these problems, with a simple and user-friendly service catalog that eliminates the complexity of ordering services across these different IT silos.

The results? Increased productivity for end-users. Faster and more efficient IT service delivery. Higher IT customer satisfaction scores and greater IT-business alignment.

So what’s new in the latest version of Cisco Prime Service Catalog? Version 10 is packed with several new features and enhancements, including:

A next-generation HTML5 user interface with new capabilities. The user experience for our IT service catalog was inspired by consumer internet sites and app store concepts, and developed in collaboration with Cisco’s own IT organization. In this modern new user interface, end-users can easily search and filter for different apps and tools to find specific services, select and configure the options they want, and place them in their shopping cart.

Depending on who they are in the organization, end-users will have a different view of the catalog – based on role-based access controls. So your employees can search and browse through the catalog to find and download different mobile and desktop apps:

Flexible policy frameworks to enable greater control of available IT services. For example, we’ve added new quota functionality for managing IT resource requests. Quotas are especially useful when automating the delivery of finite resources like storage or compute capacity, or managing against departmental budgets or grants. Another examples is our new policy alerts and enforcement for lease expirations, to notify users before auto-expiring their access to particular resources. Providing your users with the option to automatically extend or cancel their lease can improve resource utilization and increase customer satisfaction.

Finance and demand management enhancements for showback and a “bill of IT”. All IT service providers charge for their services, but the concept of pricing and costing is still new for many enterprise IT organizations. Showback is a typically starting point, and we’ve added new capabilities to differentiate pricing for different classes of service (e.g. gold, silver, bronze) for different departments or tenants. Chargeback is often challenging for many IT departments to implement organizationally, but showback can provide a “bill of IT” with the details of who is using how much of what – without actually implementing cross-department charging. In other words, it shines a light on actual IT consumption and costs. In this new release, we’ve also made it easier to integrate with 3rd party billing systems and tools (e.g. Cloud Cruiser) to help automate financial cross-charges between departments

You may have heard the buzz about the internal Cisco IT deployment of Cisco Prime Service Catalog, dubbed the “eStore”. It’s been featured in a number of articles in the media as the internal enterprise app store that powers Cisco’s BYOD and mobile apps program – and provides Cisco employees with a one-stop shop for all IT services (from desktop to data center). If you’re attending Cisco Live in Milan later this month, you can learn more about the case study in this “Inside Cisco IT” session here.

Another service catalog case study that we’re featuring at Cisco Live Milan is Steria. Steria is a great example of one of our service provider customers in Europe; they’ve used Cisco Prime Service Catalog to enable on-demand, self-service delivery for a broad range of IT workplace services, including desktop and mobile applications. You can read more in my earlier blog post – or if you’ll be in Milan, check out the session here.

During the week of Cisco Live Milan, you will also hear more about Cisco Prime Service Catalog version 10.0 in the context of our soon-to-be-announced new release of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC). Cisco Prime Service Catalog is one of the bundled components within this cloud management software solution, so the enhancements in version 10 are also reflected in the upcoming new release of Cisco IAC. You can join one or more of the Cisco Live Milan sessions listed here to learn more about Cisco IAC.

Takeaway: The Cisco Enterprise Mobility group has stayed ahead of the competition by staying innovative and cutting edge while delivering quality, high performing products and solutions, while displaying thought leadership on major technological trends such as 802.11ac and location-based services. We use this mobility blog as a platform to deliver information straight to wireless fans and readers. Here are the top 10 most read posts in 2013.

Fellow Cisco IT Blogger, Aaron Chiles, and I had the great fortune to attend the Internet Summit in Downtown Raleigh last week. For those of you unfamiliar with the awesomeness that is the East Coast and thus the Internet Summit – it is “the Southeast’s largest gathering of digital minds – 2,000 innovators, senior marketers, entrepreneurs, and technology professionals.”

Take a look below for our top 5 insights from our week long adventure in the land of marketing.

5. Be Innovative in Telling Your Story
It’s a noisy world we live in where information is flying at you from every direction. @GaryVee had a lot to say about getting your story out to the masses. His biggest advice? Be Innovative. Go where the traffic is

“The only way to be a good storyteller on different platforms is to use them and understand them.” @garyvee#isum13
— Fifth Letter (@fifth_letter) November 13, 2013

4. Privacy Isn’t a “Thing” Anymore

Did anyone reading ever say “I’ll never buy anything with my credit card online, ever!” – I know I did. Once. But then I did, and it was the most glorious thing ever. Now Amazon saves my credit card information, making it simpler for me to make quick purchases. I win because I save time. They win, because I’m more likely to make purchases.

People don’t care about privacy as much as we think. It depends on the net gain/loss of giving up personal info. #isum13
— Bill Teague (@bill_teague) November 13, 2013

3. Work is Not a Place

I think we can all agree that we were already aware of this. With mobility, smart phones, and now tablets taking the consumer market by storm, the way people engage and “work” is completely changing. It’s no longer a “work-life balance”. Now it’s all about integration.

There was a point in time when classrooms had one, maybe two things to plug in – most likely an overhead projector. When teachers were done teaching for the day, it was powered down to make sure electricity was not wasted. Over the years, the number of devices needed per individual has exploded as the Internet of Things becomes a reality. From schools and hospitals to technology companies, the number of things that are plugged in has gone largely unaddressed and has ballooned into the last and largest unmanaged IT expense.

Visibility is key to addressing this issue. It’s unrealistic to expect individuals to power down their devices when not in use. At the same time, we’ve found that a single work place device is left powered on for an average of 8,000 hours over the course of its use but only actually utilized 25-50% of the time Read More »

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